


far away from you the whole world is growing old

by feralphoenix



Series: how they felt after the flood [4]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Ableism, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Culture Shock, Other, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Quadrant Confusion, Queerplatonic Relationships, Steven Universe AU, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 20:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12871956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: “Why do—” Chara starts from next to you, tension open in their voice, but when you and MK swivel around to look at them they fall silent immediately, even clapping a hand over their mouth.“What were you gonna say, dude?” MK asks.“Never mind,” Chara says stiffly. “I think it was… probably rude.”A sleepover at MK's turns into an Earthling Culture 101 lesson, and Chara in particular gets some culture shock.





	far away from you the whole world is growing old

**Author's Note:**

> _(the morning sun crosses the threshold_ – Whence come I? I am from my childhood. I am from my childhood as if it were a country.)
> 
> A clarification for the ableism tag: This tag refers to Homeworld's canon-typical towards disability and perceived deformity, and Chara's internalized ableism after having lived in that environment for most of their early life.
> 
> The past abuse tag refers to Chara's backstory.

Only Toriel and Alphys are at the table when you and Chara walk in—everyone else is out, presumably on missions or something, because that’s where they usually are. Alphys has her charts up and is scrolling through them in quick flicks, bent over so that her gem is invisible between the rolls of her belly; Toriel has a hand on her shoulder and is watching over the top of her head, her expression firm but kind.

“Maybe we shouldn’t bother them,” you whisper to Chara.

They just grunt. _“You’re_ the one who wants to do this so bad,” they say, still low. “So go ask. I’ll at least stand here for moral support.”

This is not at all helpful, so you make a face at them to make sure they know. They shrug and give you a gentle push in the middle of your back. You stumble a few steps forward and have to windmill your arms to avoid falling over.

Toriel and Alphys both look up at the sound of your stumbling. Just great. It’s going to be a _billion years_ before they let you actually do anything to help them if you keep being this graceful.

“Um,” you say.

“Is there something you have to ask us, my dear?” Toriel says, smiling.

You give Chara a Look, because they’re the one who mentioned asking, so if Toriel overheard you that means the prompt is their fault. They just shrug at you, still not at all helpful, so you sigh and turn back to Toriel, making a face.

“MK asked me and Chara over to their house for an Earthling sleepover,” you begin. “Can… is it okay if we go?”

Both Toriel and Alphys raise their eyebrows at you. “Oh!” Toriel explains. “That sounds wonderful. Of course you may go—but do be good, won’t you?”

“We will,” Chara says.

“Y-you look, umm, pretty surprised,” Alphys observes.

“I,” you say, and then hesitate, looking down at your feet. “I kind of thought… we don’t usually have anything to do with Beach City, do we? Up until MK started visiting, I think the most we’ve seen of Earthlings is when everyone goes to bubble gem mutants if they show up in the town. So I sort of thought that… maybe we aren’t supposed to go to town if it’s not for a mission.”

“N-no,” Alphys says softly. “There’s no rule.”

You look back up, something about her tone of voice making you want to see what sort of expression she has: She’s looking back at her screens with her eyelids half-lowered, half melancholy and sort of… _wistful._ While you’re staring, trying to puzzle it out, Toriel puts her other hand on Alphys’ other shoulder, like comfort or support.

“We j-just…” Alphys starts, and then sighs. “Gems and Earthlings are… p-pretty different in some ways, that’s all. S-so sometimes it’s just… easier, t-to give each other some space.”

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” Toriel says with conversation-ending gentle finality. All you can do is turn to Chara in confusion; they shrug again, this time spreading their hands wide so that their red-streaked gem catches the light.

The two of you head out to sit on the steps. It’s still a little while until it’s time for you to meet up with MK.

“Don’t even ask me what that was all about, because I don’t know,” Chara says before you can even say anything, stretching. They let their legs fall onto the steps with two dull thunks and lean back, turning to look you in the face. “But… this was back before we found you, Frisk—from what I can remember, Alphys used to spend a lot of time in Beach City, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Chara says. “She got really into Earthling media. I think that’s even why they built the house attached to the temple, because of Alphys and her friends. I was… pretty out of it at the time, so I didn’t really stick my nose into her business, but.”

“She doesn’t go anymore, though,” you say. “She hardly ever leaves the temple.”

Chara nods at you. “Exactly.”

 

 

The walk through Beach City goes by with dazzling swiftness: You keep wanting to stop and goggle at things, but MK is charging ahead with excitement, hardly stopping for breath in between naming the boardwalk buildings, and Chara takes your hand and gently tows you along, keeping an eye on MK in case they start to trip and someone needs to grab the back of their smock.

_Still._ There are so many _people_ here, so many humans and monsters. MK names for you Snowed Inn, Grillby’s, Gerson’s general store, Muffet’s Donut Parlor, the Burger Emporium, Bratty and Catty’s junk store, the MTT Diner, and the MTT Radio building, rattled off one after the other like marbles bouncing in a jar all bright and colorful. They point out other places, too—the arcade and the amusement park, town hall.

You wonder a little if everyone in Beach City is as nice as MK. You would be a lot less lonely when everyone’s gone on missions if you had more non-mission-going friends than just Chara and MK.

Eventually MK leads you up the sidewalk to a place they call the suburbs, with small human houses in neat rows.

“Dudes! This one’s my house!” they announce, and hop up the stairs one at a time: It has a wrap-around porch, like the house in front of the temple. “C’mon in!”

You have just enough time to notice that there’s no handle on the door before MK headbutts a panel on the doorframe that you hadn’t noticed at first, and it swings open automatically.

When you turn to the side a little, as surreptitiously as you can, Chara’s looking at you with similar confusion on their face.

“Yo, the door’s gonna close on its own if you just stand there!” MK yells. You wince and hurry into the house after them.

 

 

The introductions to MK’s family—the “parents” and “sister” they’ve told you about over and over—are whirlwind. All three of them are the same kind of monster as MK, scaly yellow reptiles with ridged backs, but all three of them also have _arms._ Even though their father’s are very short.

You never really thought that much about MK’s lack of arms before, but next to the rest of their family it’s definitely clear that they’re different. The panel by the door makes more sense now; the temple doors are automatic, but you always have to get the house door to let MK in because they can’t manipulate the doorknob. Their spine doesn’t bend far enough back for them to turn it with a foot, and they can’t turn it with their mouth either. If this house had a doorknob like yours, MK wouldn’t be able to get in by themself, and even with a long handle it might be difficult for them to open on their own.

Looking around the rooms, you start to notice other panels like the front door’s on every doorframe. Asgore and Toriel talk a lot about how Earth technology is far behind your people’s, but this is a really clever way to set up the house’s layout so that MK won’t have to struggle doing normal Earthling things. When they lead you up the staircase with an invitation to their room, you note that the stairs are very long and wide, much longer than the stairs you’re familiar with. Maybe it’s to help MK not trip and fall without the help of arms to balance—though, the way they gallop up the stairs, you don’t know if that can manage to save them all by itself.

MK leads you and Chara down the hall, excitedly headbutting one of the door panels. “Okay!! So, like!!! I had you guys come after dinner ‘cause I know you don’t eat, so now we can just hang out in my room for as long as we want, yo!”

“This is the first time I’ve been in an Earthling’s room,” you say out loud.

“Heheh, it’s not as cool as your room is,” MK says with a bashful grin, “but I made sure to clean it before you guys came over so your first look at an Earthling’s room wouldn’t be all embarrassing or gross, yo!”

Both of you giggle, while Chara is silent.

Like the rest of the house, this room seems to have been set up specifically so that MK will be able to access everything. There aren’t any shelves or cabinets up high like there are in your house, just drawers with broad, curved handles that you think are probably easy for MK to get the claws of their feet around. None of them are taller than hip height. There’s no panel to open the window automatically, but there’s something on the floor that looks like a… what you think you’ve heard Alphys call a bellows, a thing you step on to move a mechanism with the energy generated. It’s hooked to complicated pulleys that are attached to the windows. There’s one desk that’s very low to the ground, where someone sitting on a stool could use tools with their feet, and another desk that’s higher up, seating what looks like a very primitive computer that doesn’t have a keyboard or any sort of touch interface like Alphys’ does. Maybe it works by voice commands or eye contact, or by thought.

“So, yo…” MK goes on, flopping down onto the bed. “What do you guys wanna do? There’s like, games… there’s the internet… we could play video games too but we’d have to go steal my sister’s controllers, haha… all I have for my playstation is my dance pad.”

“Dance pad?” you ask.

“Yeah!!! Like, they’re controllers for dancing games, but you can totally play normal games with ‘em too! It’s basically the greatest,” MK says, grinning as hugely as Undyne. “I’d offer to let you try ‘em too, but like, if we do we’ll have to take turns?? I had an extra one but I accidentally danced too hard and I broke it, sorry dude.”

“No, that’s okay,” you tell them. “We can ask to borrow your sister’s. That’s more fair than asking you to give up your controller.”

“You’re the guests, though! It’s fine, I get to play with it all the time,” MK goes on, eyes shining. “All my games on here are downloads too, so we don’t even have to worry about, like, changing discs and stuff. I’ve got a bunch, so you can pick whatever you want, yo!”

“Why do—” Chara starts from next to you, tension open in their voice, but when you and MK swivel around to look at them they fall silent immediately, even clapping a hand over their mouth.

“What were you gonna say, dude?” MK asks.

“Never mind,” Chara says stiffly. “I think it was… probably rude.”

MK tilts their head to the side as if they can’t possibly imagine; you frown at Chara. Sure, all this furniture and interior design specifically set up for somebody with no arms isn’t something you see every day, but… you’re managing to not say anything about it, and Chara’s usually a lot more tactful about sensitive things than you are. What gives?

“Now you’ve got me curious,” MK says, leaning in. “Just spit it out, man! I won’t get mad.”

Chara narrows their eyes, fingers still tense across their mouth. When they do speak, it’s quiet and even more stiff than before. “I’m not—used to. Seeing people arrange things to be… easier for. Off-colors like us.”

You turn to look at MK, whose eyes are as round and mystified as yours probably are.

“Chara, what’s an off-color?” you ask.

They bow their head and giggle into their hand, raising the other to overlap their fingers. “You _really_ don’t know anything, do you, Frisk.” They giggle again, their eyes falling closed. “Well. Well. I guess that’s probably for the best, isn’t it.”

_“Dude,”_ MK says. “What’re you being all cryptic for? You don’t have to make fun of Frisk, too, y’know.”

Chara shakes their head. “I’m sorry. But I… this really is something that you’ll be happier not knowing.”

“That’s not _fair,_ Chara,” you complain. “I’m tired of not knowing things! No one tells me anything and I want to understand why you’re getting so upset!”

Chara lowers their hands and fixes you with a smile that’s such a perfect beatific hemisphere you immediately know it’s fake; a sinking feeling spreads throughout your physical form, already sure that you’ve somehow stepped in it.

“Off-colors are what we gems call someone with something _wrong_ with them,” they say brightly. “It’s Homeworld’s term for anyone too _deformed_ to belong in society and serve our intended purpose! Gems like you and me. I don’t know what Earthlings call it.”

You have half a second to feel like someone just socked you in the stomach before Chara’s whole face turns crimson.

“I’ll leave,” they say, tone flat. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave. That was uncalled for. I’ll just—I’m going back. To the temple. It’s not _really_ an excuse, but. I did say it was rude.”

They brush past you as if to head for the door of MK’s room, and almost a beat too late you grab them by the wrist.

“Let me go, Frisk,” Chara says, still sounding artificially calm. “I want some time to be embarrassed by myself.”

“If you want to say you’re sorry, you could at least _explain,”_ you say, squeezing as gently as you can. “I don’t understand anything about Homeworld. I don’t even understand anything about the Crystal Gems or Earth, half the time, and I’m… tired of not knowing. And that _was_ rude to MK, so I think if they want an explanation too, they deserve one.” You glance over to MK just to make sure that you’re not overstepping yourself, but they’re nodding along.

“I’ve already said too much,” they reply. “You can’t… unhear this once you’ve heard it, all right? Asgore and Toriel will be disappointed enough that I’ve said this much. They said before, they wanted you to never have to hear this stuff.”

“The last time we fused,” you say, and Chara goes stiff in your grip, and you cringe a little but forge on ahead— “when we started, um, seeing things… when we saw Asriel. You thought of him as _defective like you,_ so I already have heard it before now.” You squeeze their wrist a little more, weaker this time. “Please?”

Chara’s silent for a long moment, and then they sigh. “Can I at least get some fresh air, first?”

“Sure, dude,” says MK. “I’ll go open the window.”

They do step on the bellows(?), and you gently loosen your fingers on Chara’s wrist while you watch the mechanism turn and pull open the folding windows.

Chara shifts their hand to squeeze yours just briefly, and your face feels hot for some reason when they brush past you to stand at the windowsill, pointedly avoiding your and MK’s gazes. Their hair blows in the breeze for a while, parting around the nape of their neck, strands of green peeking through the red. They look… not fragile so much as _brittle,_ you decide. Like if you touched them carelessly, it wouldn’t just poof them, it could crack them too, and irreparably.

“In Homeworld, there’s…” they say, and hesitate. _“You_ know this part, Frisk, but I’ll recap it a little, for MK, because that was really just unspeakably rude of me, and I am sorry. Gems are mass-produced in factories called kindergartens, overseen by gems known as kindergarteners who make sure that the materials to create us are injected properly into the ground and surrounding stone. If the process is done carelessly, gems can incubate for too long, or around debris that warps our shapes. Small degrees of defects may be overlooked, but if anything proves so severe that we cannot perform our intended roles, we…”

They trail off. That funny, sick feeling is back.

“Well, we’re used to power tools, if we’re lucky,” Chara goes on colorlessly. “Or we’re handed off to scientists and aristocrats to use as toys and experimental subjects, things that it would be wasteful to use _real_ gems for. Or we’re just shattered. Off-colors who… manage to get away live in hiding, in the ugliest slums and abandoned nooks and crannies of Homeworld and other colonies. Fusions are… fusions between different gem types are classified as off-color, too, I think. The Crystal Gems are… we’re all aberrations to Homeworld. That’s why we fled from them. That’s why the conflict escalated to the point of… this.”

“Earthlings have some pretty rude words for that sort of thing too,” MK breaks in. Some of the chill in the room recedes. Their tone of voice is very relaxed. “A nicer way to say it is ‘disabled’.”

“Disabled,” Chara repeats. And then: “All right. It is better, to—have a different word. I can try to use that instead.”

“You said—that we,” you manage. Your thoughts are all scrambled, like someone’s sending radio waves to jam them up.

Chara nods. “I’m a quartz, like Asgore,” they say. Finally they turn to face you, and their smile is thin and wry, their eyebrows crumpled on their forehead. “All quartzes are supposed to come out big and tough like he is. I’m entirely too small and too thin. Carbonates—carbonates like you are supposed to be big, too.”

“Oh,” you say, and look at your hands. You knew you were small, but you never quite thought of yourself as _too_ small before, or meant to be _that_ size.

Chara turns all the way around, and takes a step towards you, then hesitates, then closes the distance all at once, reaching out and taking your hands, fitting their fingers through yours. They’re warm where they touch you, and it sort of shocks you back into yourself, somehow.

“I’m sorry,” they say, small. “Asgore and Toriel… they’re different from Homeworld. They think the way gems like us are treated there is unfair. They didn’t want you to ever have to think of yourself like this, like I do. I’m sorry.” They turn to MK, too, and repeat it: “I really am sorry. I’ll try not to—do this again.”

“Okay,” MK says. “Yo, I kinda get it. The whole reason my family moved here to Beach City was so they could build the house however they wanted, ‘cause they didn’t want me to grow up in the city where they couldn’t change everything up for me. Just like with Frisk, they didn’t want me to grow up with a bunch of people telling me I’m weird and there’s something wrong with me. ‘Cause there’s not! Who needs arms when you can kick butt at video games with your feet, am I right?”

Chara smiles a little. You feel… well, maybe not as good as you did before you started insisting that Chara explain all this, but still _better._

“Good,” MK says, and grins. “So, here’s my extremely cool and rad segue into stuff that’s less depressing: Wanna see just how much butt I can kick at video games with my feet?”

“Yeah,” you say, and Chara says “Sure” at the exact same time, and you all smile at each other. Today’s probably going to work out okay after all.

 

 

It’s much later, deep into the night when you and Chara have gotten out MK’s spare blankets and pillows and plopped down on the floor while they roll around in their bed.

“I’ll tell a story,” Chara says suddenly. “A nicer story, to make up for all of the bad stuff I was talking about before. And it’s a true story, too.”

“What kind of story, dude?” MK mumbles.

“A story about the Crystal Gems,” says Chara. “About how we all became the Crystal Gems in the first place.”

_“Duuuuuuude,”_ MK says, attention suddenly rapt. You giggle a little. “I wanna hear!”

“I want to hear too,” you say, wiggling your toes. Chara’s hand finds yours in the blanket nest, and even though this happens all the time in your own room, today it feels tingly-special, exciting somehow.

“Yeah, they never told you this story,” Chara says. “It has too much to do with the way that Homeworld thinks about… about gems like us.

“A long time ago… an important aristocratic gem from Homeworld who was visiting a colony planet decided to tour its kindergarten with her two most trusted bodyguards. The kindergarten had just changed supervisors, and a very skilled and famous kindergartener was overseeing it now. The aristocrat wanted to see that kindergartener’s work for herself.

“Now, the aristocrat didn’t know her bodyguards as well as she thought that she did. See, the two bodyguards were left to their own devices a lot while she was busy with high society and with her own work, and the two of them had become very close to each other in times when they were alone. So close that… well, one day when they were together just… fooling around, they learned that their bodies could combine to become a whole new kind of gem.

“The two bodyguards, who were still just called Sodalite and Carnelian back then, had heard the rumors of other gems who performed inter-caste fusion being punished, even shattered, for defying the natural order of Homeworld, so they were afraid, and they knew they had to keep what they did a secret. But even though it had been an accident the first time… they liked fusing. The gem that they were together, Rhodolite, was so much more than they were apart, and they wanted to give Rhodolite a chance to exist. So they fused when they were sure they could be alone, and were very careful to never let their master know.

“Sodalite, Carnelian, and their master all traveled to the kindergarten together—their master unaware that her most trusted servants were secretly rebelling against Homeworld in quiet ways together, right under her nose.”

Toriel and Asgore are usually so dignified—you can’t imagine them like this, newly in love and sneaking around behind a superior’s back despite the risks. You almost giggle trying to picture it, but the fact that the two of them have never been lovey-dovey at all since you met them is sobering, so you manage to hold it in that way.

“When they got to the kindergarten and met its kindergartener, who went by Jet at the time—you’ve never met him, Frisk, he was one of the ones we lost—he and his assistant, a Hopeite who had come out a little wonky but was still within the range of accepted defects, were dealing with an unusual situation. A gem had just come out of the holes that had been created by the previous kindergartener, even though that cohort of gems had already emerged long ago and had joined active service as soldiers.

“The gem who had emerged was…” Chara trails off here for a moment. “That gem was a topaz like all the gems in the cohort who had emerged on time and without problems, but unlike the rest of them… he was a perfect Imperial Topaz, not just a normal yellow one. The exact shade of Earth honey. A gem like that ought to have been assigned a higher-than-usual position thanks to that sort of quality, but Asriel… he had specifically the same problem as us. Overbaked. He was about a third the size he was supposed to be, so there was a lot of consternation about what to do with him.

“Topazes are a soldier caste, so… normally off-color, I mean disabled, topazes are just shattered as soon as they come out, unless there’s some sort of situation where extra soldiers are necessary. But the kindergartener had been putting it off. At the time everybody assumed that it was just because Asriel’s gem was otherwise so perfect.

“Even Toriel and Asgore’s master wasn’t sure what to do with Asriel, and because she outranked the kindergartener in charge, she decided to stick around to decide for herself what ought to happen to him.

“While she was deliberating, she wasn’t moving around too much, so Toriel and Asgore had the chance to get to know Asriel. Who was really sweet even back then, and who got really attached to them right away, and they got really attached to him too!

“But their master was starting to talk about how decadent it would be to have something in her personal quarters or a favorite tool powered by an Imperial Topaz, and how come to think of it she knew some inventors who wanted test subjects for their new tools. Gem destabilizers were…” Chara’s voice grows faint, and they squeeze your hand hard, wavering when they pick back up. “New models of them were getting popular back then, and some of the inventors would… they’d use them on off-color test subjects over and over, saying they wanted to see if we would come back with a proper form if they just poofed us enough times. Even though they… knew that wasn’t possible.”

You squeeze Chara’s hand back, lacing your fingers tight with theirs.

“Anyway. Toriel and Asgore obviously didn’t want that to happen to Asriel, but they didn’t know what to do; if they fused to fight back against their master, they might win, but then they would still be turning all of Homeworld against them and wouldn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to turn to.

“But that’s when the Jet kindergartener… when Gaster, that’s what he named himself when we came here, approached them and told them his secret.

“He thought that the way we off-colors are treated was cruel and wasteful, when there were still ways that we could be useful to Homeworld and to our companions, even if those ways were different from what Homeworld wanted. Aside from keeping Papyrus as his assistant, he was hiding a too-small Larimar, Sans, from Homeworld detection, and had an underground network for trying to relocate off-colors in safe places before Homeworld could get to them.

“Gaster said that he’d about reached the limits of what he could do to help gems like us while maintaining his job as a kindergartener, and that Toriel and Asgore could help provide the muscle he needed to take a stand and get away safely. So the three of them got together with Papyrus, Sans, and Asriel… and they fled into space together. And that was the beginning of the Crystal Gems.”

_“Whoa,”_ MK says.

“What happened to the gem that used to be in charge of Toriel and Asgore?” you whisper.

“That’s a really long story, but you don’t have to worry about her,” Chara says, confident. “She did chase us all the way here to Earth, but… she was caught up in Homeworld’s attack and got corrupted. We tracked her down before we even found you. She’s safely bubbled in the temple right now.”

That still sounds like a problem if that gem ever gets un-bubbled or her corruption is fixed, actually, but that’s a lot less scary than the thought that she might show up on Earth some day to bother everyone.

“I think I was just jealous,” Chara says out of nowhere. “And that’s why I got angry.”

“Dude, what are you talking about?” MK asks.

“I mean… earlier,” Chara says, pulling their hand out of yours. They don’t mean anything by it, but it still stings at your chest in the vicinity of your gem, and you frown into the dark where they won’t see it. “You and Frisk both have only lived on Earth, where you can live in an environment that people actually _adapted_ for you, and you’ve always been treated like _people,_ instead of… I just felt like it wasn’t fair that you’ve always gotten to have that when I didn’t, so I got angry. I shouldn’t have been rude to you, though; it’s not your fault that I wasn’t made here. So, I’m sorry. Really.”

“I guess that’s true, and I appreciate the apology,” MK says, unusually solemn. “But, like, yo… even if you weren’t _born_ on Earth? You still get to live here now. So you don’t have to be jealous of Earthlings, ‘cause living here sorta makes you one anyway. Y’know?”

“I’m an honorary Earthling?” Chara says, sounding amused. “How does that work?”

“Well… you live here! So you belong here. There’s this thing called immigration on Earth where even if you come from someplace different, if you want to live here and you take the right steps, you count as belonging to _here._ Like, I’m explaining this real bad, but that should count for space aliens the same as it counts for people from different countries, right?”

“That makes sense,” you say.

“I, hmm, I don’t know if I can just… _decide_ to belong to Earth after feeling for so long that I don’t belong to anywhere,” Chara says, still amused, “but I’ll at least try to think about it.”

“Good! You should,” MK declares, their voice satisfied.

It takes a few more minutes for you to realize that by MK’s definition, you already count as an Earthling automatically, because this is where you were made. You think that over for a few hours, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

It’s a weird feeling, but… it’s definitely not a bad one, you think.


End file.
